LOS ANGELES — Time magazine has again turned to a concept for its latest person of the year, choosing “The Protester” in recognition of a year in which unhappiness with politics and the economy was given voice in streets around the world, most notably in the Mideast.

“Is there a global tipping point for frustration?” asked the magazine’s top editor, Rick Stengel, in a statement Wednesday. He appeared on several morning talk shows to push the same theme.

“Everywhere, it seems, people said they’d had enough,” Stengel stated. “They dissented; they demanded; they did not despair, even when the answers came back in a cloud of tear gas or a hail of bullets. They literally embodied the idea that individual action can bring collective, colossal change. And although it was understood differently in different places, the idea of democracy was present in every gathering.”

Time picked its first person of the year, then called man of the year, in 1927 with Charles Lindberg, who put aviation on the map. In the years since, it has chosen the good, Mohandas Gandhi in 1930; the bad, Adolf Hitler in 1938; and even the ugly, the computer in 1982. Responding to the Cold War, the magazine praised Hungarian freedom fighters in 1958, and its thematic ideas have included Baby Boomers in 1966 and Middle America in 1969.

The selections carry with them a certain amount of self-promotion for the magazine. The choices (like the ubiquitous 10 best lists also entering their busy season) could help boost circulation as well as the prestige of the designee and the institution making the award.

Still, such recognition represents a milestone that highlights the role of the year’s protests and their meaning.

This year was hardly the first in which crowds of people took to the streets. Indeed, the Quaker adage of speaking truth to power is at least 60 years old in its word formula and centuries, if not millennia old, in its spirit. There were food riots in the ancient world, slave rebellions in Roman times and the occasional revolution, peaceful or not, since the 1700s.

Given how nasty, brutish and short human lives have been over the eons, it may be more of a wonder that there have been so few revolutions. And that goes to one of the points that magazine writer Kurt Anderson makes in his argument for the protester selection.

“‘Massive and effective street protest’ was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester, once again, became a maker of history,” according to Anderson.

From humble beginnings by a Tunisian 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, 2011’s protests came after an extended period of relative calm in much of the world.

The Mideast was the centerpiece of the year’s protests, with the Arab Spring’s results still being felt across the region.